One must keep in mind, many times a web site appears to be doing something supernatural, yet upon a deeper analysis, it is often revealed that artificial importance has been assigned to the web site as a result of a cleverly implemented SERP manipulation scheme. Frequently these are brilliantly deployed and very difficult to detect even for the most seasoned code-cruncher. Are these the types of web sites that do not require meta data in order to competively challenge other web pages for meaningful keyphrases? Exactly what keyphrases are we talking about here that the keyphrase winners do not require meta data? Not any that I'm in that for sure. What are these keyphrases specifically? Are they in meaningful competitions or just obscurities?

... empircal evidence ...

The important thing for any webmaster is to consider should always rest on what it is that the search engines want and what it is that they say will reward the web site.

Have you thought about that lately or is that irrelevant?

A site can in fact perform incredibly well under practically every conceivable situation imaginable. Just when I think of something that couldn't possibly work well in the SERPs, an example of it working well in the SERPs pops up before me. This is all part of SERPs battles. Things sometimes work well but shouldn't technically and things sometimes don't work well but technically should work tremendously.

Ok, fair is fair. :p I thought it was implied (by the usage of the words "I think" and "My 2 cents" that my statements were opinion). Since empircal evidence for SEO algorithims is difficult to provide since the algos themselves are proprietary in nature. [/COLOR][COLOR=black]Please correct my previous post to say that it is my opinion. And that all of the following below is my opinion.

I have seen first hand that creating unique meta description tags got a bunch of web pages out of supplemental results. I never said anything about the algo and the SERP. I believe they impact how your site is indexed (i.e. supplemental results) and if your pages are supplemental, they will most likely never see the light of day for any "normal" searches. Therefore, I do believe that they have some value.

BTW, what is good for the goose is good for the gander, you are making statements that are clearly being presented as fact., for example Where is your empircal evidence to back these statements up?

1) Good content naturally contains the keywords users are looking for

2) The keywords will also be in the appropriate markup like <hx> tags and <em> tags, etc., because that's what the page is about

3) Good content encourages other websites to link to them unilaterally (a.k.a link baiting). We all know just how valuable this is in Google's algorithm and MSN as well.

4) If a web designer/developer takes usability and accessibility into consideration, and everyone should, their site will naturally be friendly to the search engines' crawlers as they are essentially no different then a screen reader or other accessibility-usability-needy user.